The hot summer nights are slowly turning into cool autumn days, and that only means one thing. No, we’re not talking about back to school sales. We’re talking about the September Issue.

The Super Bowl of the fashion world – with the best advertisements, most pages and hottest cover stars, this month’s issue is responsible not only for captivating the hearts of fashion-lovers all over North America, but for setting the tone of the entire year to come.

We’ve been waiting anxiously for months to find out what celebrities made the cut for this year’s covers – but with their recent release, we’ve been less than impressed. And the reason why can be summed up in three words:

White, white, white.

The latest covers feature shockingly little diversity. In fact, only three magazines – Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, andInStyle have a non-white celebrity on their front page. And to put it quite frankly, we’re fed up.

Jennifer Lawrence was chosen as this year’s Vogue cover star despite already covering the magazine twice before and being featured in their 2013 September cover. This isn’t to say that Jennifer Lawrence isn’t a worthy actress, but there are about a zillion celebrities of colour who are not only as talented, but who haven’t been featured on the cover three times already.

Let’s be real though – given the mainstream fashion world’s less-than-impressive track record, we shouldn’t be that surprised. POC celebrities are given dismal representation in major fashion campaigns and magazines compared to their white counterparts.

But the good news is, things are gradually (that is, incredibly and painfully slowly) getting better.

Take for example Harper’s Bazaar who featured pop icon The Weeknd on their cover this year, and Teen Vogue who gave actress and activist Amandla Stenberg a spot. InStyle – while still not winning the gold medal in diversity at least made a decent effort by featuring Selena Gomez (obviously in an attempt to promote her collaboration with Coach).

These three deserve some credit. But this year’s September lineup has been by and large a hugely disappointing leap backwards.